Your Favourite Director’s Favourite Director

By Isabel Armstrong, Third Year History

The 1936 Spanish general election, only the third ever held in the modern system, resulted in a significant swing in favour of the left-wing coalition parties. Unhappy with the results and perhaps justified in their claims of fraudulent voting, the right-wing coalition seized control of the army and began the Spanish Civil War.  

Whilst most Anglophones only know the period through ‘Homage to Catalonia,’ the impact of the war, and the dictatorship established in its aftermath, still impact modern Spain today. Francisco Franco, who had gained power through skill, luck, and support from Hitler, emerged in 1939 as the ‘Caudillo’ of Spain, an homage to the titles of Duce and Führer chosen by Spain’s allies.  

The Nationalist dictatorship lasted until Franco’s death in 1975, whereupon Juan Carlos I, restored by Franco who assumed that he would keep the dictatorship, appointed a reformist democrat to transition the country to democracy.  

The Francoist regime, whilst not technically fascist, followed several of its hallmarks, with a particular emphasis on repressing non-conformists, and on autarkic economics. The regime rolled back a number of Republican principles in line with Catholic conservatist values, banning abortion, civil marriage, homosexuality, and encouraging women to remain within the domestic sphere.  

Franco was particularly aggressive in targeting republicans, and the regions who had failed to support the coup from the beginning, often those with long-standing pretensions to independence like Catalunya and the Basque Country. The sum of this repression was that, whilst freedoms were somewhat increased in the 1960s and 1970s, the death of Franco unleashed a massive cultural explosion. 

Termed ‘la movida madrileña,’ the movement – movida - was mostly focussed around Madrid – madrileña – and the surrounding region of Castilla-La Mancha, which had been the seat of Franco’s government. Anything anti-fascist, or taboo under Franco, was hailed, with a particular emphasis on sexual liberation as a driving force throughout the new music, film, art and fashions which young creatives were making.

Franco had controlled state media through the aptly named department of No-Do (‘Noticiario y Documentales’ – News and Documentaries), overtly censoring liberal ideas, crime, sexuality, and often policing female behaviour. The cinema produced in the 1980s was therefore saturated with hedonistic imagery and themes, which the population had never before seen on their screens. Everything, literally everything, was permissible, particularly for ‘la movida’s’ most well-known auter, Pedro Almodóvar. 

Born in rural Castilla-La Mancha, Almodóvar’s films typified ‘la movida’ with his liberal approach to sexuality and their bright, campy, aesthetics. Almost every aspect of his films are a reaction to the Francoist regime, a style which has remained consistent to the modern day. His films often have entirely female casts, only depicting men as the sources of women’s problems.

One example is ‘Volver,’ (2006) where the singular supporting male character is punished for his crime of rape by being murdered, triggering three generations of estranged female family members to reunite (estranged, of course, by the fault of a man). The sexual freedom present in his films cannot be understated; Almodóvar’s breakout full-length feature film, ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom,’ (1980) was released just 5 years after Franco’s death, and depicts a three-way “watersports” scene.  

Whilst Almodóvar theoretically ended ‘la movida,’ as his films became too popular to be confined to the largely underground cultural movement, the thematic approach which developed as a reaction to the post-Franco world has simply evolved over time.

Originally, more focussed on the ‘Pact of Forgetting’ in which Spain decided to absolve its citizens of crimes committed during the regime, the ‘Historical Memory Law’ reverted the official stance to condemning the regime and memorialising its victims. Almodóvar’s films followed suit, exploring the mass graves which continue to be discovered containing people who ‘disappeared’ during the regime in his latest full-length feature, Parallel Mothers.  

Historical studies of modern Spanish cinema and history are often hindered by language barriers, but maybe the chance of seeing Antonio Banderas play a serious role will encourage new generations to delve into foreign-language film.